


take my name

by coricomile



Category: Adventures of Pete & Pete
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-14
Updated: 2012-12-14
Packaged: 2017-11-21 03:11:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/592788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coricomile/pseuds/coricomile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is nineteen and the world ended before his ever really began.</p>
            </blockquote>





	take my name

**Author's Note:**

  * For [snarkydame](https://archiveofourown.org/users/snarkydame/gifts).



They drive.

Big Pete takes the wheel in the morning, arms stiff and legs aching from cold, and plows through the crunched, broken leaves left un-raked from autumn, blowing through stop signs and red lights. He is nineteen and the world ended before his ever really began. Beside him, his brother sleeps curled up against the door, hat pulled low over his forehead, bundled up in their father's clothes.

There’s something about the midwest that Pete’s never been sold on. Something about the wide openness of it, maybe, or something about the windmills that they keep passing. The fields stretch on, dry and overgrown without the farmers to look after them, an endless sea of brown. They’ve stopped to pick salvageable corn and beans from the crops that managed to survive, but they always taste burnt, like they’ve been on a grill for too long. When he thinks about it, Pete can taste it on the back of his tongue, a reminder of backyard barbeques that he’ll never see again. 

Little Pete hates being in the car. He’s full of reckless energy that makes him jostle until the car is vibrating, the growing pains he says don’t exist eating at him from the inside out. He’s getting too tall for his clothes, but he refuses to let Pete get him any new ones. If little Pete was a jerk when he was a kid, he’s grown into an asshole as a teenager. Pete is not surprised. 

“Where are we?” Little Pete asks, grumbling into his shoulders. The car is cold, but Pete’s afraid to turn the heat on. Gas is going to run out one day, and he doesn’t know what will happen to them when that inevitably comes. 

“Does it matter?” Pete asks. Little Pete cracks open an eye and glares at him. He’s losing the baby fat around his cheeks, and the line of his jaw is looking more like Dad’s every day. It’s weird. Pete looks back to the road and shrugs. “Illinois, I think.”

“Can we go to Chicago?” Little Pete sits up, neck cracking loud enough in the silence of the car to startle them both. They don’t turn the radio on anymore. Not after the stations went down, leaving nothing but static behind.

“I guess,” Pete says. “Get the map out.”

It makes him uneasy to think of a big city right now. After the sickness hit, Wellsville had become a ghost town. It had started with the middle school. A flu, they’d said. Nothing to be worried about. Little Pete had watched his friends get sicker and sicker, and come home pale when he’d figured out that no cure was coming.

They don’t really talk about Wellsville anymore, either.

Pete takes a left onto the highway at little Pete’s command. Even though there’s no more police to enforce the speed limit, Pete still goes at an even fifty-nine miles per hour. Something feels wrong about breaking the law. Like, if he stops obeying the law, everything will fall apart completely. When little Pete drives, he presses the pedal to the floor and hopes for the best.

Sometime after the sun has set, the skyline begins to pop up in the distance. Pete follows the old, dirty signs that say Chicago in big, white letters. Little Pete has been asleep for a few hours, the map spread open on his lap. He’s not really a good navigator. Gets bored too fast. Pete needs to find him something to do with his hands. Maybe if they find somewhere to settle down, they can learn how to do... stuff. Something. Time is the one thing they have too much of. 

Pete pulls off into the lot of an abandoned Best Western. Without the streetlights it looks eerie. Like something out of a horror movie. It is, kind of. A horror movie in real life, with no ending in sight. Little Pete stirs when Pete cuts the engine. Even in the dark, Pete can see the red patch blooming out across his brother’s cheek from the window.

“Are we there?” Little Pete asks, words slurred. Sometimes, if he squints, Pete can see the chubby cheeked kid that fought to stay up for a week. But when he opens his eyes, there’s just a surly teenager with too-small clothes and a fading tattoo.

“Almost,” Pete says. He turns the headlights off and pulls the keys from the ignition. “Hotel. We can go to the city in the morning.” Little Pete yawns and tumbles out of the passenger seat. His jeans show a half inch of sock when he stands.

Pete pulls their duffle bag from the back seat and locks the doors. It’s comforting to hear the click of the locks. So far, they haven’t come across anyone else, but something about the lock makes him feel safe. Little Pete swings the old baseball bat they found in Ohio over his shoulder. Before, they’d been wielding one of their dad’s golf clubs. Both of them had felt a little better once they’d buried it out of sight.

The lobby smells funny. It’s probably from the kitchen. If they go up far enough, they won’t notice. Some places aren’t as bad. Some have been worse. Pete pulls his shirt up over his nose as he goes behind the counter to grab the skeleton key from the top drawer of the desk. Little Pete leads the way up the stairs, thumping the bat against the wall every few steps. It’s an offbeat pattern without rhythm behind it, enough to make Pete’s skin start to ache in annoyance. When they reach the sixth floor, he shoves little Pete through the door on the landing. 

Someone left their luggage. It sits by the door closest to the stairwell, tilted back against the wall. Little Pete pokes it with the end of the bat. When nothing happens, he steps past it. He thinks there’s going to be monsters, eventually. Or aliens. Pete doesn’t have the heart to tell him that the monsters have already come in tiny, microscopic waves. 

They wind up in a room with a queen. Pete drops their duffle on the floor and tries the light switch. He sighs in relief when the light flickers on. They’ve stayed in places without generators. It had been hard to sleep in the silence left behind. Little Pete flips the heat on and cranks it. Pete will have to get up and turn it down some time in the middle of the night. 

They take hot showers, scrubbing away the grime from the road, and crawl into the bed. Even when there’s two beds, they sleep together. Little Pete won’t say it, but he’s just as scared as Pete is that one day he’ll wake up alone. The bed is a little musty, but the mattress is soft under Pete’s sore body. He presses his back to his brother’s, bare skin hot against bare skin, and closes his eyes.

“I don’t want to go anywhere anymore,” little Pete says, muffled into his pillow. When he looks over, Pete can see Petunia resting over the back of little Pete’s head. He needs a haircut. 

“Okay,” Pete says. His brother flops over, legs that have gotten too long kicking under the sheets to pull the tucked corners out. 

“We can find a house,” he says. Pete rolls over and lays an arm over little Pete’s stomach to still him. “Or stay in the hotel. Chicago has a lot of places to get gas. We could keep the generator running for a long time.”

“Okay,” Pete says again. He pats the smooth skin of his brother’s hip. He’s already starting to sweat. “Tomorrow. Go to sleep.”

Little Pete’s quiet for a moment, those gears in his head cranking away. Finally, when Pete’s almost passed out, he feels his brother relax down into the bed. 

\---

Pete doesn’t really think about his dreams anymore. He used to, back when they were all about walking into class naked, or about losing his teeth in terrible lunchroom accidents. But now, they’re more like reminders. Painful and long memories that he’ll never see again. He dreams about Ellen and Teddy, dreams about playing trombone and laying out on the front yard while his parents read books in their lawn chairs. He dreams about his little brother staging war on the adults with his own personal superhero. No, Pete doesn’t really think about his dreams. 

He wakes up damp, pressed chest to back against his brother. The heat is whirring away again, pouring through the room and making the air sweaty and stale. Pete climbs over his brother’s loose, warm body and flips the heat off again. He thumbs the lock of the window, frowning when it sticks. The paint has worn together over the years, swollen shut with disuse and changing seasons. After a few tugs, it finally cracks apart with a sucking pop, paint chips falling to the carpet. Outside, snows falls in thick, messy clumps, patchy over the pavement of the parking lot. The station wagon’s windows are frosted over, snow sticking to the windshield wipers. 

In the bed, little Pete’s managed to kick the covers off the mattress. The stretched, old tattoo of the pirate ship on his back looks sharp and new again in the dim light of from the window. It’s morphed a littled, stretched as he grew, but Pete can still see the lines like they were when little Pete came home with it at the tender age of seven. For a moment, he can hear his mother’s concerned voice again. 

“Wake up,” Pete says, shaking his brother’s shoulder. His palm covers two masts, but the sail stretches beyond his hand. 

“Bite my toe jam,” little Pete grumbles, pressing his face into the pillow. Red creases spiderweb across his cheek from the bunched cover. Pete shakes him again. And again. His stomach is starting to ache with hunger. 

“I’ll leave you here,” Pete says. It’s an empty threat and his brother knows it, but, still, little Pete reluctantly rolls to the floor and searches for his clothes.

They leave their duffel bag in the room, but bring the bat along. The station wagon takes a few tries to start up, but once the engine turns over, it putters down the snowy streets steadily. Pete doesn't let his brother drive in the snow. Or the rain. They've survived the sickness. They're not going to go out via telephone pole.

The city looks a lot like everywhere else. Boarded up store fronts and abandoned cars, littler building up into decay on the streets. Pete doesn't know what people outside of Wellsville did with the bodies. So far, he's only seen one dead person, back when he and little Pete had first started driving. He's not naive enough to think it will be the last, but he still hopes for it.

Without the lights and people, downtown Chicago isn't as exciting as either Pete had hoped for. The buildings are impressive, but empty. Reminders of the things that never will be again. Pete parks the car right in the middle of Wacker Drive and cuts the engine. Before he's got the the keys out, little Pete is already heading toward the Sears Tower, baseball bat in hand.

The shattering glass of the windows busting out sounds like bombs going off. Pete hunches into his coat and watches his brother's shoulders flex and pull as he swings the bat with everything he's got. The door, when Pete tries it, is unlocked.

They climb every floor. Pete's thighs burn by the tenth flight up, but he chugs along behind little Pete, sweating under his coat and breathing hard. He doesn't know how long it takes, but it feels like forever. Like a never ending space of stairs and his heavy breaths mixing with his brother's. In this space, the sickness doesn't matter. If they just keep going up, nothing will ever catch them.

Little Pete climbs over the rail of the skydeck when they finally reach it. A flutter of fear curls up in Pete's chest as he watches little Pete's boots on the steel, but he doesn't reach out to stop him. Instead, he looks out over the city. Everything looks so small from here. Insignificant.

"What now?" Pete asks, when the cold has gotten to be too much for him. Little Pete shrugs and throws his leg back over the rail. For a moment, it looks like he's going to fall one hundred and three floors straight down, but at the last second he tumbles into Pete's open arms. When their eyes meet, sad and open and tired, Pete knows that he wouldn't want to be with anyone else.

"Whatever we want," little Pete says. He grins, all crooked teeth and baby fat cheeks, and Pete can't help the way his own mouth tries to mirror it. "We're going to do whatever the hell we want."

And they do.


End file.
